Have nothing to do with the [evil] things that people do, things that belong to the darkness. Instead, bring them out to the light... [For] when all things are brought out into the light, then their true nature is clearly revealed...

Tag Archives: Health Care

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, December 20, 2017:

After five months and 5,000 words, the journalists at the New York Times refused to use the word “socialism” as the cause of the horrors they uncovered in Venezuela. Instead, Venezuela’s problems are the result of years of “economic mismanagement” instead.

What they found was horrific, and more than sufficient to prove the point: socialism destroys, maims, and kills. Its worst atrocities are inflicted on the defenseless: the elderly and the very young. The intrepid journalists focused on the latter, and what they found was predictable and heartrending: babies in Venezuela are dying of malnutrition at rates seen only in refugee and concentration camps. Emergency rooms are filled to overflowing by mothers with starving infants at their breasts while others are being turned away. Doctors told the journos that children arrive at the hospitals weighing the same as when they were born. Infant mortality rates are soaring, and there’s little doctors can do about it. Said the authors: “The statistics that have come out are staggering. In the Ministry of Health’s 2015 report, the mortality rate for children under four weeks old had increased a hundredfold [while] maternal mortality had increased nearly fivefold.”

Matt Vespa suffers under no such confusion about the cause of what’s happening there:

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, November 10, 2017:

The short answer is: they will find other work. They will also find that other work to be more rewarding, higher paying, more satisfying, and providing greater benefits to others than they did while working for the bank. That’s how the free market operates, when it is allowed to.

It’s not that those DB employees didn’t have fair warning. In September, DB’s CEO, John Cryan, hired in 2015 to turn the bank around, told them:

Increasingly frustrated over Congress’ inability or unwillingness to dismantle ObamaCare, President Trump tweeted earlier this week, “Since Congress can’t get its act together on HealthCare, I will be using the power of the pen to give great HealthCare to many people — FAST”; and now he has.

Of course the president cannot “give” anything to someone that hasn’t been taken from someone else, but other than that, the president is heading in the right direction. Leaks concerning his executive order, which he signed on Thursday, were confirmed: His order points to less government intervention and more individual freedom.

Calling the present Affordable Care Act an “Obamacare Nightmare,” Trump said his alternative is better:

Sounding rather testy that the Senate didn’t give him what he wanted on Thursday, President Trump tweeted on Saturday morning that he would not only punish senators and their staffs but cut off the government funding of subsidies — estimated to be $8 billion — to hungry insurance companies. He tweeted: “After seven years of ‘talking’ Repeal & Replace, the people of our great country are still being forced to live with imploding ObamaCare!” He then tweeted the not-so-subtle threat:

If a new HealthCare bill is not approved quickly, BAILOUTS for Insurance Companies and BAILOUTS for Members of Congress will end very soon!

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, July 26, 2017:

Democrats are so upset over the Democrat Party’s new slogan that some demanded that its originator be fired immediately. The slogan, unveiled by Democrat Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer in the New York Times on Monday, is: “A Better Deal: Better Jobs, Better Wages, Better Future.” This was birthed after months of intense mental analysis of last November’s loss to Donald Trump, and it was, according to many, stillborn. The Gateway Pundit massaged Papa John’s Pizza logo on its website, showing Nancy Pelosi beneath the banner, and below, instead of “Papa John’s” was “Dems: Still Pelosi.” It’s worth clicking on it. (See Sources below).

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, July 5, 2017:

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just revised its January report with new data on spending, revenues, and economic growth. The revision isn’t good:

The projected rise in [annual] deficits would be the result of rapid growth in spending for federal retirement and health care programs targeted to older people, and to rising interest payments on the government’s debt, accompanied by only moderate growth in revenue collections.

In other words, the CBO simply doesn’t believe that President Trump’s plans to reduce regulation, cut taxes, and repeal ObamaCare will amount to much. Instead the government programs on autopilot — Social Security, Medicare, and especially debt service on the country’s $20 trillion national debt — will eat up nearly 80 percent of the government’s total budget in less than 10 years. Said the CBO:

The U.S. Treasury announced on Thursday that the federal government collected more money in May than in any other month in history: $240.4 billion. In the same breath, it said that the government spent $328.8 billion, creating a deficit of $88.4 billion.

From a wage earner’s perspective, it meant that in May the average worker paid $1,572 in taxes but the government spent $2,149, making up the $577 difference by borrowing. Such deficit spending is making the S&P Global credit rating agency increasingly nervous.

Just a week earlier, the agency affirmed its best rating — A-1+ — for the government’s “short term” debt, which means, in its own parlance, that the federal government’s ability to pay its current bills is “strong.” But in the longer term, the agency is far less sanguine. While holding its current long-term rating at AA+ (one full notch below its best rating), it said it’s unable to give the United States its highest rating (AAA) because of “high general government debt, relatively short-term-oriented policymaking, and uncertainty about policy formulation” for the future. It explained what it meant about that “uncertainty”:

Some of the [Trump] Administration’s policy proposals appear at odds with policies of the traditional Republican leadership and historical base. That, coupled with lack of cohesion, not just across, but within parties, complicates the ability to effectively and proactively advance legislation in Congress, particularly on fiscal policy. Taken together, we don’t expect a meaningful expansion or reduction of the fiscal deficit over the forecast period.

And what does it say about what’s likely to happen over that “forecast period”?

The U.S.’s net general government debt burden (as a share of GDP) remains twice its 2007 level. While, in our view, debt to GDP should hold fairly steady over the next several years, we expect it to rise thereafter absent measures to raise additional revenue and/or cut nondiscretionary expenditures.

What does that phrase “next several years” mean? How much time before the government’s national debt explodes upward? Says S&P:

Although deficits have declined, net general government debt to GDP remains high at about 80% of GDP. Given our growth forecasts and our expectations that credit conditions will remain subdued, thus keeping real interest rates in check, we expect this ratio to hold fairly steady through 2020. At that point, it could deteriorate more sharply, partly as a result of demographic trends.

Translation: Deficit spending will remain “subdued” for three and a half years, and then Katy bar the door!

Here is where S&P bows out of the picture, giving way instead to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which completed the picture in its March report:

Federal debt held by the public, defined as the amount that the federal government borrows from financial markets, has ballooned over the last decade. In 2007, the year the recession began, debt held by the public represented 35 percent of GDP. Just five years later, federal debt held by the public has doubled to 70 percent and is projected to continue rising.

“Continue rising”? By how much? And by when? The CBO is blunt:

Debt has not seen a surge this large since the increase in federal spending during World War II, when debt exceeded 70 percent of GDP. The budget office projects that growing budget deficits will cause the debt to increase sharply over the next three decades, hitting 150 percent of GDP by 2047.

So, that ratio of government debt compared to the country’s economic ability to produce goods and services was 35 percent in 2007, is now 70 percent, and will soon be 150 percent.

And what’s the reason?

The majority of the rise in spending is largely the result of programs like Social Security and Medicare in addition to rising interest rates. For example, Social Security and major health care program spending represented 54 percent of all federal noninterest spending, an increase from the average of 37 percent it has been over the past 50 years.

It appears to be an unstoppable locomotive. Non-discretionary spending (spending already locked into place by past Congresses and fully expected to be received by its beneficiaries) is on autopilot. And interest rates now coming off historic lows are only going to increase those annual deficits into the future as far as the eye can see.

The CBO is about as close as one can get to a truly non-partisan federal agency — one that has no partisan political agenda and is considered by many as the most reliable forecaster of future economic events. So it’s not only willing to cover, analyze, and present its findings candidly, it’s also willing to tell the truth. It asked, rhetorically, “What might the consequences be if current laws remain unchanged?” It answered:

Large and growing federal debt over the coming decades would hurt the economy and constrain future budget policy. The amount of debt that is projected under the extended baseline would reduce national saving and income in the long term; increase the government’s interest costs, putting more pressure on the rest of the budget; limit lawmakers’ ability to respond to unforeseen events; and increase the likelihood of a fiscal crisis, an occurrence in which investors become unwilling to finance a government’s borrowing unless they are compensated with very high interest rates.

Which brings one to the ultimate rhetorical question: What happens when even those “very high interest rates” aren’t enough to compensate those investors for the risks they are taking by loaning their money to a government that increasingly isn’t able to pay its bills and must continue to borrow increasingly massive amounts to cover its deficits? What happens next?

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, June 6, 2017:

The Connecticut State Capitol in downtown Hartford

Joseph De Avila, writing in the Wall Street Journal following Aetna’s announcement of its imminent departure from Hartford for more business-friendly climes, used the “B” word: “Hartford, Connecticut’s capital city and hub of the state’s insurance industry, is edging closer to a small club of American municipalities: those that have sought bankruptcy protection.”

As a hanging tends to focus the mind, so is Aetna’s departure focusing more and more attention on Hartford’s financial problems and, to a greater extent, those of the state of Connecticut itself. After being headquartered in Hartford since before the Civil War, Aetna said

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, June 5, 2017:

Aetna building in Hartford, Connecticut

The state has a staggering deficit of more than $5 billion, home prices are about where they were a decade ago, unemployment is rising (not falling as it is elsewhere in the northeast), and big companies who have been there for decades are leaving.

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, February 16, 2017:

Senator Rand Paul

Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Representative Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) introduced their ObamaCare Replacement Act (ORA) on Wednesday. It would simultaneously repeal nearly all of ObamaCare’s most onerous demands and mandates while opening up the health-insurance market to individuals to purchase, or not to purchase, coverage. The bill, S.222, might more appropriately be named the “Health Insurance Freedom to Purchase Act,” putting the decision to buy, or not to buy, coverage back in the hands of individual citizens and taking it out of the hands of the federal government.

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, February 17, 2017:

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson said many things on which classical liberals and libertarians agree. The one most apropos to Obamacare is this: “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”

Anything that requires government force (or threat of) to gain compliance is, on its face, immoral. But Obamacare did something else: it was a deliberate forced attempt to shift personal responsibility for one’s health care from a citizen to his government. Jefferson had this to say about that:

The Heritage Foundation minced no words in commenting on its latest Index of Economic Freedom: America’s continuing decline is all Obama’s fault:

America’s standing in the index [now in 17th place, the lowest in history] has dwindled steadily during the Obama years. This is largely owed to increased government spending, [increased] regulations, and a failed stimulus program that enriched the well-connected while leaving average Americans behind.

For the ninth time in 10 years, America’s index has lost ground. Coming in above 80 in 2008, the United States’ current index is barely above 75, tying it with

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, October 18, 2016:

When Matt O’Brien updated his previous article on the slow-motion collapse of Venezuela on Monday for the Washington Post, he reviewed the symptoms achingly familiar to those following the events: the collapse of oil prices; the incompetence of the cronies running the state-owned oil company (former Marxist Hugo Chávez replaced the workers who knew what they were doing with political cronies who didn’t); the inflation of the currency followed as night follows day, with price controls to mask the resulting inflation; inflation, as measured by the black market’s pricing of the Venezuelan bolivar, causing the bolivar to lose more than 90 percent of its value in just two years; the empty supermarket shelves; the oppression by police of those standing in long lines to purchase whatever might be left in those stores; and on and on. As O’Brien lamented:

Some of my Christian friends tell me they can’t in good conscience vote for Donald Trump because, when faced with a choice between “the lesser of two evils,” the morally right thing is to choose neither one. They recommend voting for a third-party or write-in candidate.

As a professor who has taught Christian ethics for 39 years, I think their analysis is incorrect.

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, February 12, 2016:

Barack Obama signing ObamaCare into law.

Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid must be proud. The health insurers behind ObamaCare are losing money and some are considering leaving the monstrosity altogether. Many of the co-ops that sprang up during the rollout have closed their doors, despite receiving millions in government aid.

Harry knew exactly what he was going when he built it. In an interview at “Nevada Week in Review” in 2013, before the rollout, Reid said:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, February 10, 2016:

Obama’s signature on ObamaCare bill.

The results for 2015 are in. The losses health insurers experienced following the rollout of the so-called Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA, otherwise known as ObamaCare) in 2014 got even worse. Seventy percent of insurers lost money on individual health plans, according to McKinsey and Company, the global management consulting firm. And it isn’t likely to improve any in 2016.

Estimates that price inflation in Venezuela is running between 10 and 20 percent a month are too low if one looks at the black market there. By putting price controls on essentials such as personal care items and medicines, President Nicolas Madura (pictured), a protégé of Marxist Hugo Chávez, Venezuela’s previous president, has guaranteed at least two things: shortages and rationing. A healthy but very expensive black market has sprung up to meet consumer needs for items such as chickens, medicines, and toilet paper.

In that black, or free, market, Venezuelan women were shocked to find that the price of tampons and other sanitary supplies jumped

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, September 1, 2015:

This month marks the 30th anniversary of the The New American. On such an occasion, it is appropriate to reflect on the magazine’s track record, from the accuracy of our facts and the soundness of our analysis to the stories we unearthed and the influence we’ve exerted.

We are proud of our track record. But there is one recurring theme that seems to be particularly striking when reviewing the articles we’ve published, and that is the extent to which we have accurately projected the lines

Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was one of the first to react to the report just released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on Friday. She was so quick to comment that there was suspicion she had had no chance to read it. When the details behind the report came out, that suspicion was confirmed.

The House member most responsible for garnering the 219 votes needed in the House in March 2010 to pass ObamaCare – the Affordable Care Act, or ACA – is remembered for her comment made during a 20-minute speech just prior to passage:

Careful observers of Hillary Clinton’s brief announcement for the presidency on April 3 noted one word missing: redistribution. She alluded briefly to how “the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top,” but she focused instead on wanting to be everyone’s “champion,” supporting strong families, same-sex marriage, and economic opportunity.

She and her advisors no doubt read and took to heart the latest from Gallup. In 2006, by a margin of more than two to one, 69-28, those surveyed said that